TLDR of my most recent article 🧵
A long-term debt cycle progresses through stages:
- early expansion (sustainable debt growth)
- bubble formation (unsustainable borrowing)
- market top (debt burdens peak)
- deleveraging (credit tightens, asset prices fall), and reflation/recovery (policy stimulus restores growth)
Currently, the U.S. exhibits late-cycle characteristics, with national debt reaching $36 trillion by March 2025—up from $34 trillion in 2023—driven by post-COVID deficits and decades of leverage accumulation. The Federal Reserve’s rapid rate hikes from near 0% to 5.25%-5.50% (maintained as of March 2025) have inverted the yield curve, signaling potential recession risks and tightening credit, particularly affecting interest-rate-sensitive sectors like housing and small businesses.
touching down in the US after 21 days of based around the world — want to share some quick reflections:
1. builder energy has 10x'd in the last year. in every country we touched down in — kenya, india, thailand, singapore, malaysia, philippines — hundreds of builders showed up to build the future. my mind is blown and i feel so grateful. thank you all for showing up to build with us.
2. base culture is attracting world-class leaders. in every country, people are showing up to build a global onchain economy and doing it in a based way. this is proving to be a filter for incredible talent: folks who are hard working, visionary, creative, optimistic, and excited to build the future.
3. if we're not on the ground, we're not in the game. we learned so much and made so many important connections being in every country. and it became really obvious how important being there really is. we're going to be 10x'ing our on the ground presence in 2025.
... cont'd in next cast
1/ About "Lateral Thinking Withered Technology" 「枯れた技術の水平思考」
Gunpei Yokoi, one of the main architects of Nintendo's original Game Boy, and many other hits like Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, etc -- I think this used to be one of his mottos. An interesting thing that Nintendo did was they meticulously understood that their way of competing with the market was not latest state of the art technology -- but rather to utilize mature (used to be cutting edge but now is now) technology - to do something fun, exciting and give an experience to the customer
There's a story about How Yokoi and his team was about to release the Game Boy, and some Nintendo engineer got concerned about a competitors product. Yokoi asked them, is the screen color? and they said yes (the original gameboy was monochrome) and he was like phew, that's great. They constrained themselves to use a "reliable" technology like monochrome displays at the time which cost significantly less - and had longer battery life
An update on protocol priorities going into 2025.
We think a lot of interesting things are going to be built onchain soon. Farcaster should be the programmable and credibly neutral social network that brings users, developers and blockchains together.
But what does this mean tangibly?
